Music industry calls for more power to help troubled Stars

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Posted on 21 October, 2009 by Mr. Writer

They’re calling it the “Michael Jackson clause” – but it’s got nothing to do with suspiciously generous out-of-court settlements with tweenage boys. According to The Guardian, a coalition of managers and label bosses are working to hammer out a legal clause that will enable labels to ’suspend’ – ie stop paying – any artist who gets too whacked out on drugs to do his/her job.

Tales of heroin-hooked rock stars and anorexic starlets are as old as pop music itself. But Michael Jackson’s sudden death from a suspected overdose of the anaesthetic propofol galvanised managers, musicians and label executives into pushing for help for musicians and giving more power to labels.

Marc Marot, former head of Island records, said there was wide support for an enforceable clause in an artist’s contract – as well as a music industry charity to help troubled artists.

Concerns over the wellbeing of stars such as Amy Winehouse have revealed the powerlessness of an artist’s entourage and even families to intervene. But Jackson’s death this summer sparked action, said Marot. “I felt very saddened because at any step of the way there have to have been people who would stare him in the eye and talk about his self-harming behaviour and I guess they got moved on or fired,” he said.

Labels therefore had a unique force over artists. “Lawyers, accountants, managers, tour managers and personal assistants are in a terribly vulnerable position. They are one phone call away from being fired at any one point … But record companies are different. Record companies can’t be fired quite so easily. You’ve got a six-album deal with an artist and you are only one album in and they begin to fall off the wagon.”

Artist manager Peter Jenner, who worked with Pink Floyd, The Clash and Ian Dury, agrees labels should play a bigger role. He recalls Dury going “extremely weird” after his first album and as a manager in his early 20s trying to deal with it. “I was 23, 24 and coping with someone having a psychotic breakdown,” he said.

But labels have also been guilty of allowing addictions to arise and should take more preventative steps, he argues. That makes good business sense anyway. “Labels if they are smart would not be so anxious to give people hits right away. I think they should spend a lot less money in the short-term. They need to take time, watch people, see who is a good person to invest in,” said Jenner.

Marot conceded that any clause in record label contracts would take time to hammer out. One of the lawyers consulted on the plan, Andrew Thompson from leading media and entertainment law firm Lee and Thompson, predicted widespread resistance from artists.

“You may recommend record companies to insert a provision to the effect that if the artist is not, in the opinion of the company, in a suitable state to promote properly the company will be entitled to suspend the contract until the artist is in a suitable such state,” he said. “The artist community is unlikely to accept that the record company is to be the arbiter of what is or is not a suitable state of health.”

On a cold economic level, this makes sense. Artistically is deeply flawed, for one glaring reason: artists have often made their best music while mashed out of their gourd. From Bob Dylan to Iggy Pop, songwriters frequently hit the sharpest creative form of their careers when they’re hurtling headlong into a druggy abyss .

Without drugs, there’d be no ‘Screamadelica’, no ‘Revolver’ and no ‘Be Here Now’ (so it’s not all bad). History shows us that a debilitating narcotic haze is no barrier to recording spectacular music. Fleetwood Mac burned through so much coke while recording ‘Rumours’, drummer Mick Fleetwood wanted to credit his dealer on the liner notes – and would’ve done, had said dealer not been executed before the album came out. And yet it’s an utterly, unarguably fantastic record.

Besides which, drug-addled musicians are funny. We all love hearing the tale of how Keith Richards flushed his stash down the studio toilet because he heard the police were at the door (turns out it was Sting and Stewart Copeland), or the time a booze-blasted Ozzy Osbourne pissed ants all over the Alamo, or something.

Rock stars do these things because they know they can get away with them. So please, record label execs, don’t break a butterfly on a wheel. Allow your musicians to fulfil their manifest destiny by scoffing their own weight in stimulants.

http://thepopscene.wordpress.com/200...roubled-stars/